Gettting historical wind data

[brendo1001]

Any chance we can pull the historical wind speed data in get_historical()? Useful for ET0. For that matter ET0 historical data could be useful, but this can be estimated so not too important.

[jonocarroll]

Any chance you could point to a source on the BOM site? So far get_historical() grabs data available from this section but I could expand on it if wind data is served somewhere

[brendo1001]

I find the wind data here: http://www.bom.gov.au/watl/eto/ Don't know if it helps though or whether you can extract from here. The weather record probably does go back that far as for the other variables, so might be difficult . Thanks anyways.

Cheers

[jonocarroll]

It's not clear that data can be extracted nicely. It appears to be stored in monthly CSV files by location with human-readable site names for the filenames, e.g. http://www.bom.gov.au/watl/eto/tables/sa/adelaide_(kent_town)/adelaide_(kent_town)-200901.csv. Adelaide, for example, only goes back as far as 2009, whereas the rainfall data goes back into the 1830s.

It wouldn't be too hard to scrape the entire site's wind/ET0 history month-by-month and combine them, but this may be a little imposing on the server. @adamhsparks?

[adamhsparks]

If you need historical wind data, many of the BOM stations are in the GHCN data available through https://github.com/ropensci/rnoaa or GSOD data available through https://github.com/ropensci/GSODR. However, the data in GSOD only goes back to 1929. Maybe those are better avenues than scraping the BOM site for this package?

I could check to see if there is a way to align station IDs between GSODR and bomrang, but it's far down the list of things to do right now.

[brendo1001]

Thanks guys for looking into this. Its not a biggi but thought i would enquiry. I will follow up the GSODR lead though.

[adamhsparks]

Closing this issue. Can reconsider in future if a better option than scraping the site can be found.